🚀 go-pugleaf

My 2 cents:

> My *personal* $0.02:
> 
>    I do not think applets and web browsers have much future in the
> bigger game of internet applications.  Web browsers, HTML, and Applets
> are nice - but VERY limited and not at all useful for real application
> development.
I couldn't disagree more.  Clients by far and large are going to be 
running some version of Windows.  MS already has 85% of the PC market, 
and the recent announcements in the settop box world seem to indicate 
that Windows will be there also.  The only other clients of note will be 
NC's (currently non-existent), and perhaps something to replace the 
phone.

HTML or some other scripting standard will be the client rendering 
mechanism of choice, and the technology that will host it in volume will 
be a browser oriented mechanism.  So for the presentation layer of 
applications, browsers et al will be very important.

The application logic will be done completely outside the presentation 
mechanism, probably on "virtual application servers" (which could be 
located on your PC, in your house on a PC, on your block at the cable 
company, whatever).  Java is perfect for this.

>    The real future of Java depends on the performance improvements of
> the VMs, quality of the development environments, and cooperation among
> big players for its language specification.  
Agreed.

> The real value of Java is the 'write-once-deploy-anywhere' feature.
OK, I'll probably get nailed for this one, but I completely disagree.  
This is an argument that makes a great technical demo and great fodder 
for investors, but has *never* proven to be the case in the real world 
(with Java or any other technology).  Only when competitors have a 
significant economic interest to cooperate, do they do so.  We are 
already seeing the VM fragment in its implementation across vendors.  
What will the future hold when IBM, Sun, Microsoft, Oracle et al need to 
get a leg up on each other.

Sure, if I have 2 or 3 hardware vendor supplied boxes that I can run the 
same code base on each (after tweaks) easier than I can if coded in C++, 
but as soon as you sneak in the "native compiled for the platform" piece, 
we are back to debugging differences in implementation details among 
vendors.

The best argument for Java is that as a language, it is a better C++ in 
terms of productivity, and a better Visual Basic in terms of robustness 
and flexibility.  It is especially suited to object/component 
development, and because of its inherent network/scalability features, 
great for doing application component development for deployment on 
application servers.

my opinions <g>.

Tad Frysinger